“Here be dragons – and wolves, bears, witches, camels, elephants, orcs, elves and hobbits. A map of Middle-earth, which to generations of fans remains the greatest fantasy world ever created, heavily annotated by JRR Tolkien, has been acquired by the Bodleian library in Oxford to add to the largest collection in the world of material relating to his work, including the manuscripts of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.” (via The Guardian)

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May 3, 2016Comments Off on Tolkien annotated map of Middle-earth acquired by Bodleian libraryBodleian, Tolkein

“For anyone looking to define Taijitu, Putso or Sangha, or to learn about Elizabeth Fry, the Junior wives of Krishna, or the Royal Ploughing Ceremony, one of the top internet search hits will be Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Articles about these, and hundreds of other topics, are now being improved using the Bodleian Libraries’ historic collections. Images from Digital.Bodleian collection are being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, the database of freely reusable digital files. From here they can be embedded in articles not just in English Wikipedia, but in other languages and in other educational projects. So far, more than six hundred articles, across many different languages, are illustrated with images from the Bodleian Libraries, reaching a total of nearly 1.5 million readers per month.” (via Wikimedia Blog)

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July 16, 2015Comments Off on Wikimedia projects benefit from Bodleian Libraries residencyBodleian, wikipedia

“Unloved, dingy, almost prison-like. Oxford’s New Bodleian Library has always been an oddball among the university’s architectural treasures – a bland lump on the corner of Broad Street and Parks Road. Inside, the 11 levels of book stacks constipated the core of the library, and gave it a leaden atmosphere. But when it reopens on 21 March as the Weston Library, it will be a hey presto moment for the city. The building has been transformed, and will become a magnet for pathological swots, local café society and legions of tourists.” (via The Independent)

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March 16, 2015Comments Off on Oxford’s New Bodleian Library has had a radical modernist makeoverBodleian

“A partnership is making the texts of the first printed editions of William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton and other early English books available online. The University of Michigan Library, the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries and ProQuest have made public more than 25,000 manually transcribed texts from 1473 to 1700. These include more than 5,600 from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.” (via AP)

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“Where can you find locks of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s and Mary Shelley’s hair alongside the fragments of Sappho’s poetry? At the Bodleain Libraries in Oxford, England. And also in the book “Marks of Genius: Masterpieces from the Collection of the Bodleian Libraries.” The book includes writings and drawings and ephemera dating from ancient times — Sappho’s fragments are from the 2nd century AD — to the 20th century. Over all that time what constitutes genius has changed.” (via LA Times)

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September 4, 2014Comments Off on Literary treasures from Oxford’s Bodleian LibrariesBodleian, Oxford